Brazilian newsroom Aos Fatos offered a behind-the-scenes glimpse into their reporting process covering the January coup attempt and their use of DocumentCloud in a webinar.

Last year, the newsroom received a Gateway Grant from MuckRock that allowed them to create an archive of millions of data points collected from social media networks during the January coup attempt.

The coup involved a group of supporters of former Brazilian President Jair Bolsanaro, who ransacked federal buildings in the capital city of Brasília, including the Supreme Federal Court, in order to overthrow the newly-elected government of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

In the webinar, the Aos Fatos team showed how they consolidated their document collection on DocumentCloud and opened access to their dataset to dozens of other researchers and journalists.

Aos Fatos then used the archive to tell stories about the coup and tapped large language models, or LLMs, to analyze the data set. Their review of LLM tools on social media posts was used to analyze social media posts for hate speech, toxicity, disinformation and manipulation.

As part of this project, Aos Fatos created Golpeflix, a multimedia product documenting the aftermath of the January 8th coup attempt. The project contained more than 119,000 images, 25,000 audio files and 321 videos collected from social media accounts, to show how Bolsanro and his supporters created a disinformation campaign to incite the coup.